During Christmastime of 1984 teatro la fragua began staging scenes of Biblical stories with dramatizations of the texts surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. The following year, in Holy Week, the teatro staged the first version of The Assassination of Jesus. Since then, this version of the Passion of Jesus has been continually developed and has been toured by the company to numberless villages, towns and cities in Honduras, and it has been toured internationally in the United States and Spain.

The work is a theatrical interpretation of the Passion of Christ, and has become one o the classic works of la fragua, both in the sense of being the most presented work in the repertory, and in the sense of being the work in which the teatro found it's personal style which has served as the inspiration for all its subsequent work. It is no exaggeration to state boldly that this is one of the finest existing theatrical interpretations of the Passion, bringing to life a profoundly Honduran reading of these key events in the Christian identity of the culture.

The staging of The Assassination of Jesus, is inspired by theatrical techniques that come from a study of the Christian artists of the European Middle Ages, when the churches were converted in popular theatres to evangelize and spread the Christian message. But teatro la fragua also draws on contemporary theatrical techniques, starting from the Story Theatre method elaborated in Chicago by Paul Sills. The visual style is inspired by the Medieval and Renaissance painters, who did not try to recreate the historical epoch of the time of Jesus, but who situated the Biblical stories within the context of their own contemporary world. In this spirit, teatro la fragua places the story in the context of a contemporary Honduran village. This gives a new life to the traditional story, and emphasizes that this is not just a pious story that happened thousands of years ago, but that it deals with events that continue happening in our daily lives. Thus the work aims to instill humanistic and Christian values in the contemporary cultural context.

actors
JOSÉ RAMÓN (CHITO) INESTROZA
RIGOBERTO FERNÁNDEZ
YESTER (YUMA) ESTRADA

text
TEXTS OF THE FOUR GOSPELS

music
J. S. BACH, WENDY BLACKSTONE, RICHARD CLAWSON, ORLANDO DI LASSO, W. A. MOZART Y JACK WARNER sj

choreography
LIC. CARLOS MANUEL PÉREZ

musical arrangements and audio
EDILBERTO GONZÁLEZ

lighting design
JACK WARNER sj

lighting technicians
WALTER GONZÁLEZ, JOSÉ RAMÓN BARDALES

costumes
JOSÉ RAMÓN (CHITO) INESTROZA

administration
WALTER GONZÁLEZ, LIZETH ALVAREZ

vigilance
SALVADOR VELÁSQUEZ, SANTOS DUBÓN, DARWING AVILA

artistic direction
EDY BARAHONA

direction of teatro la fragua
JACK WARNER sj